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Last week brought another pungent reminder of why Wall Street is preoccupied with disasters in the technology industry: When they happen, they can be spectacular.

BlackBerry
(ticker: BBRY), which once ruled the roost in corporate mobile computing, with a market capitalization of nearly $82 billion in the summer of 2008, a year after
AppleAAPL -0.8743973196044782%Apple Inc.U.S.: NasdaqUSD121.3
-1.07-0.8743973196044782%
/Date(1438376400350-0500)/
Volume (Delayed 15m)
:
41225145AFTER HOURSUSD121.45
0.150.1236603462489695%
Volume (Delayed 15m)
:
1659808
P/E Ratio
14.006928406466512Market Cap
691740216377.936
Dividend Yield
1.7147568013190437% Rev. per Employee
2409500More quote details and news »AAPLinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position
(AAPL) released the iPhone, saw its shares plunge by 17% on Friday as it announced what at least one analyst called a "disastrous" quarterly operating loss of almost $1 billion, and said it would lay off about 40% of its staff.

At a $4.6 billion market cap, BlackBerry is a shell of itself, despite continuing to produce very good products.

The company missed the boat as smartphones became a consumer phenomenon. It failed to see how that shift would also erode its place in the corporate world.

The future for BlackBerry now looks increasingly like an asset sale, a leveraged buyout, or sale to another tech firm, though no one can quite figure out who would want it.

BlackBerry had $6 per share in cash at the end of the prior quarter, but one analyst, R.W. Baird's William Power, opined on Friday that the company may have burned through $500 million in the quarter, or $1 per share. BlackBerry also probably has about $3 per share in value in its various patents, he wrote.

Cloud software runs on massive data centers built by the software vendors, rather than being installed on customers' computers. That is supposed to massively reduce the cost to clients to maintain the software, and also erode traditional packaged software sales of Oracle and the rest.

Workday is not profitable, but trades at 31 times this year's projected sales, versus 3.2 times for Microsoft. Salesforce, whose earnings are a perennial matter of Wall Street debate, given that they exclude the cost of stock options, trades at 155 times the 34 cents a share it may earn this year.

If you think that sounds rich, consider that Salesforce's profit per share will actually decline by 17% this year.

IT'S ALL ABOUT TOP-LINE GROWTH, with Salesforce projected to increase revenue 30% this year versus perhaps 3% for Oracle. Workday may increase sales as much as 63%.

In the world of disruption, revenue that's rising among the challengers is coming from the collapse of the old way of doing business, and therefore the disrupters' stocks is presumably where growth investors move as they trade out of names such as Microsoft and Oracle.

Just as BlackBerry has seen an irreversible dissolution of its grip on mobile computing, the thinking goes, the old guard in software will have their businesses carved out.

I've heard about the move to the cloud regularly in meetings with companies, especially tech companies. Increasingly they tell me they don't buy software for things such as managing their employees' benefits; they just rent that capability from Workday. Renting software avoids their capital outlay on computer equipment and software, which is a big deal, particularly for a start-up.

The implications were nicely laid out on Friday by CLSA's Ed Maguire, who rates Salesforce shares a Buy, and thinks the company is changing the economics of the technology industry.

Software is being turned into a self-service affair, writes Maguire, where a person who doesn't run the IT operations of a company can log into a Website and buy capabilities such as human-resources management (the specialty of Workday) or customer relations (Salesforce's bread and butter).

The head of marketing, he notes, increasingly is the person who makes the IT decisions, not the chief information officer. As companies become more and more relentless marketing entities, the people controlling technology spending are not tech people; they're brand and image people.

Over time, Salesforce becomes more than just an app you can rent. Instead, it offers what Maguire calls a "platform." What the platform means is that all manner of applications get built to run on the data centers Salesforce owns and operates. Companies no longer need to build computing power by buying servers and routers, but can rent it all. More than 300,000 programs of various sorts have been built to run on Salesforce's cloud, he notes.

And yet, even if one appreciates how the disrupters are shaking things up, are their stocks really worth 31 times sales? Or 155 times profit?

There are a couple reasons it's hard to bet against such insane valuations, reasons that have less to do with fear and more to do with cool calculation.

Salesforce's business model, and that of the other cloud outfits, is subscription based, rather than reliant on discrete purchases of copies of software. That means that quarter after quarter, the company can demonstrate a backlog of unfulfilled, but collected, revenue "in the bag," so to speak. And Wall Street likes a bird in the hand.

The other thing that has made it hard to short these stocks successfully is the memory of acquisitions that have taken out cloud companies at healthy premiums.

Oracle acquired two of the most prominent ones, RightNow and Taleo, for $3.4 billion in recent years, at premiums north of 20%. SAP paid more than half again the market value of SuccessFactors to buy the firm in late 2011.

Until incumbents such as Microsoft can prove their cloud-computing chops and diminish both the threat and the promise of cloud companies, or all the disrupters get bought out by Oracle and others, as much as one can sneer at the valuations, it seems hard to see them coming down.